One thing thatís been overlooked
during the brouhaha between the DOJ and Microsoft is the companyís role in
creating hundreds of ecological niches for small companies who profit by
filling the gaps in Redmondís
products. True, if one of those niches turns out to be particularly profitable,
Microsoft is likely to either buy the small fry or bury them by incorporating
the functionality of their product into Windows or another product, but in the
meantime, a lot of people have an opportunity to make a nice living and to make
things easier for the rest of us.

An excellent example of this is a
product called Nelson Organizer, from Caelo Software (Nelson, British
Columbia; www.caelo.com). After using it for about a
month, Iím convinced that Nelson is an absolute necessity for any serious user
of Microsoft Outlook. While the product has a few holes in it (itís only
version 1.1), it adds so much needed functionality to Outlook that I guarantee
that you wonít be able to do without it after trying it for a week or so.

Nelson is an add-in for Outlook and, so, does not change
the functioning of the program in any way. (You can switch between Nelson and
Outlook using a menu button that appears in the tool bar of each program and
Nelson can be set to run automatically whenever Outlook does.) What Nelson does
is add an additional interface that is far more useful than the standard
Outlook presentation of messages and folders by automatically organizing mail
into several different kinds of folders not found in Outlook. These include by
correspondent, date received, attachment, and bulk mail (mail not specifically
addressed to you).

The basic Nelson interface consists of four windows (See
Fig) and a set of tabs at the bottom. The tabs select the view displayed by the
upper left-hand window: Hot, Correspondent, Bulk Mail, Date, Attachment, and
Search. The upper right-hand window displays the contents of whatever folder is
selected in this window, the lower right-hand windows the contents of whatever
message is selected above and the lower left-hand windows a view of your
Outlook folders.

Selecting Hot gives you a view of whatever Nelson folders
you tag as hot, so you can have a mix of by-date, by correspondent, and by
attachment. This is, perhaps, the most useful view and the one most people will
spend most of their time in. Selecting Correspondent gives you an automatically
generated list of the people who have sent you mail. Bulk Mail, of course,
displays all mail not specifically addressed to you. Date sorts mail by New
Since Time (the time being the last time you reset the
folder), Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week, and, then, by month.
Attachment sorts by type of attachment, allowing you to quickly find a Word
document, Excel spreadsheet, JPEG image, and so forth. You can drag messages between folders just as in Outlook.

The Search tab is Nelsonís biggest win. It allows you to
search any and all folders by keyword and to save searches for repeated use. It
searches the subject, message body, and address information and supports
wildcards and the simple Boolean operators and, or, and near (within ten words).
Searching is extremely fast. Having used this feature, I find it hard to
understand why Microsoft left it out, but the fact that they did is good news
for Caelo: this feature alone is worth the cost of the program ($29.95 single
copy, discounts and site licenses are available).

Nelson is not without its weaknesses. Although the
program enables you to reply and forward mail from within its interface, I
could never get this feature to work. Technical support was very helpful, but
they had only run across this problem once before and could only, after all
possibilities were exhausted, suggest that I reinstall Outlook. Since I can
still reply merely by opening the message (which puts one into the Outlook
interface), I havenít bothered yet and may notóitís not a big deal.

Another weaknessówell, not weakness, but an obvious
feature not yet implementedóis the inability to delete attachments from within
the attachment windows, or to automatically save attachments into designated
file folders. Outlook stores everything in one gigantic file, making it a
necessity to save attachments into file folders if you want access to them
after youíve archived your old mail (if you donít, the Outlook PST file will
eventually fill up your hard disk and slow your mail processing to a crawl).
However, the Caelo folks tell me they are considering adding these features
and, even without them, no one who relies on Outlook should hesitate even a
moment to install Nelson.